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Era of the Normans
The '''Era of the Normans' lasted from about 978 AD until 1095 AD. It began with reign of King Ethelred the Unready of England, which would set in motion the events leading to the Norman conquest of England. It then ended on the eve of the Crusading Age. The centuries from the end of Classical Antiquity to the 11th-century can seem at a glance like a long slumber for European civilisations in which little had been accomplished, with the obvious exceptions of Byzantium and Muslim Spain. No medievalist would agree of course, seeing instead a great age of foundation when certain great markers laid out the pattern of the future, but within which change was slow and its staying power uncertain. Then after the year 1000 or so, a change of pace can be detected, made possible by more settled conditions for Europe. As it turned out, the Vikings and the Hungarian horsemen were the last intruders that Europe would experience; or at least the last for Western Europe since the East would still have to endure the Mongol invasions of the 13th-century. Europe would enjoy a tremendous period of political, economic, cultural, and territorial growth during the High Middle Age (978-1337). An age of adventure and growing self-confidence was beginning for Europe, epitomised most clearly by the Normans. They had come a long way from the Viking raiders who settled in northern France from 911, taking to the French administrative and legal systems, feudalism, language, customs, and style of warfare; their armoured cavalry charges were virtually irresistible. Yet they did not completely lose touch with their Viking past, displaying a love of fighting, an almost reckless courage, and an extreme wanderlust. In 1066, Norman Duke William the Conqueror crossed the Channel, killed the king at the Battle of Hastings, and claim the English throne for himself. Another group of Norman adventurers conquered southern Italy and Sicily from the Muslims and Byzantines. The High Middle Ages also produced many different forms of intellectual, spiritual, and artistic works. Building on the spread of Christianity and monastic reform begun at Cluny Abbey, a series of great reforming Popes, beginning with Leo IX (1049-54), spearheaded the moral and spiritual reform of the Church, targeting indiscipline, corruption, clerical marriage, and most controversially freedom from lay interference. This policy of course brought the Church into continuing conflict with secular rulers, especially the German monarchs, who had ironically supported Church reform all over Germany as a way to undercut feudal localisation of power. In the Investiture Controversy (1076-1122), those very Popes they had encouraged, came to challenge their rights to "invest" bishops and abbots in Germany. A protected series of spectacular quarrel between Church and State was just one aspect of the more uncompromising and militant form of Christianity that would characterise Europe between the late-11th and 13th centuries. The long developing estrangement between eastern and western Christendom finally resulted in the Great Schism of 1054, the permanent split between the Latin Christian (Catholic) and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Another aspect was military campaigns that enjoyed papal support, which provided a licence for the predatory appetites of the feudal nobility; they could spoil the Muslim with clear consciences. Again the Normans were in the vanguard, taking Sicily from the Arabs, as well as swallowing the last Byzantine possessions in southern Italy; they would also provided much of the firepower of the First Crusade. Meanwhile in Spain, the Christian kingdoms in the north came to see the ''Reconquista'' as a religious cause. History Europe in 11th Century At the end of the 10th-century, there were few signs of the astonishing success that European civilization would enjoy in the second millennium. The approach of the year 1000 was no portentous event for most Europeans; they were unaware of it. Counting by years from the supposed birth of Christ was by no means yet the rule, with most realms still using regnal year; the 4th year of the reign of such-and-such a king. If the comparison is with Byzantium or the Islamic Caliphate, then Europe west of the Elbe was for centuries after the Roman collapse an almost insignificant backwater of world history. In the year 1000, the population of Western Europe may then have stood at about forty million, probably no bigger than that of the Classical Antiquity in the same area. At any rate, there is no evidence of more than a very slow growth of population until the 11th-century. It was an overwhelmingly agrarian society, where subsistence was for a long time to be almost all that they could hope for. The cities in which a small minority lived were built among and of the ruins of what the Romans had left behind; none of them could have approached in magnificence Constantinople, Córdoba, Baghdad or Chang'an. Many of its peoples felt themselves a beleaguered remnant and so, in a sense, they were. Islam cut them off from the Mediterranean, the highway to other civilizations and their trade, and Arab raids tormented their southern coasts. From the 8th-century the seemingly inexplicable violence of the Vikings fell like a flail time and time again on the northern coasts and river valleys. In the 9th-century the eastern front was harried by the pagan Magyars. Only a thin channel of sea-borne communication with an increasingly culturally alien Byzantium brought Europe some relief from its introverted, narrow existence. Yet Byzantium and eastern Christendom were at least a cushion which just saved Europe from the full impact of Islam and of steppe nomads. Men grew used to privation rather than opportunity. They huddled together under the rule of a feudal warrior elite which they needed for their protection. For centuries even the greatest European kings were hardly more than barbarian warlords to whom men clung in fear of something worse. Literacy was virtually a monopoly of the Christian Church; far into the Middle Ages, even kings were often illiterate. There was little commerce, little government control, and violence was simply an accepted part of life. In fact, the worst was over in the year 1000. As it turned out, the Vikings and Magyars (Hungarian) were the last barbarian intruders to menace Europe; at least the last for Western Europe since the East would still have to endure the Mongol invasions of the 13th-century. Moreover, the Muslims were being challenged in the Mediterranean by a resurgent Byzantium under the Macedonian Dynasty (867-1056). Not only had the pressures upon European civilization begun to relax, but its basic political and social structure and Christian culture were already hardening. In the High Middle Age (978-1337), a change of pace can be sensed, for which the centuries sometimes called the Dark Ages had provided the foundations. Well before this, three great changes were under way which were to shape the Europe we know. One was a shift away from the Mediterranean, the focus of Classical Antiquity. The centre of European life, in so far as there was one, moved north, built around the Rhine valley, where the future France and the future Germany were to emerge. By preying on the Mediterranean sea-lanes, Islam helped to throw back the West upon this heartland of a future Europe. The second change was a gradual advance of Christianity well beyond the old Roman frontier, with the conversion of Scandinavia, Iceland, Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria, and the Slavs. Christendom made this diverse collection of polities increasingly culturally homogeneous. Versions of saints names such as John were common everywhere, even in Ireland and Scandinavia; as were Germanic names like Henry. The use of Frankish practices such as royal charters, coins, the ritual homage, and coats-of-arms all became generalised. Christianity also came to define Western Europe’s purpose, with religious zeal motivating a steady expansion, to the Holy Lands with the Crusading Age at least temporarily, to Byzantine Southern Italy and Muslim Sicily with the Norman conquest, to the pagan Baltic coast with the Northern Crusades from the 12th century, and to the expansion of Christian Spain with the Reconquista. The third and final change was the steady weakening of free peasantry, as determined local lord concentrated control of land in their own hands and coerced agricultural labour into subjection. The ultimate result was that the elites became rich in surplus, which formed the base of the extension of urbanization and trading connections. Pioneered by the Vikings, the North Sea and Baltic Sea steadily developed as a trade route, with a network of coastal ports the foci of exchange of all kinds. Christian Church in 11th Century The Christian Church had come a long way by the end of the Early Middle Age. The faith had spread across Europe, slowly at first and then with greater speed, more or less from west to east: Ireland was first in the 5th-century; followed Scotland, England and central Germany in the 7th-century; then Saxony by force in the 8th; Russia, Bulgaria, and other Slavs in the 9th; Bohemia and Poland in the 10th; Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Hungary in the years around 1000; and Sweden more slowly across the 11th-century. Only the far north-east, the Baltic and Finnish-speaking lands, was left out of this for now; the conversion of Lithuania in 1387 ended the last explicit pagans of the continent. Moreover, Christianity was faced by no spiritual rival in western Europe, pervaded the whole fabric of society, and something like a monopoly of culture and learning. Yet if the Church's successes were huge, then its institution failures were great too. Its leaders long felt isolated and embattled, having suffered greatly at the hands of Viking marauders, menaced by Muslims in the Mediterranean, and increasingly at odds with the Eastern Church. It is hardly surprising that western Christianity developed an aggressive intransigence, almost as a defensive reflex. Nor was it threatened merely by enemies without. Western Christendom strove to keep its teachings and principles intact in the middle of populations still with vestiges of paganism and superstition. The powerful monarchs of this world surrounded it, sometimes helpfully, always a potential, and often a real, threat to the Church’s independence. All this it had to do with a body of clergy of whom many, perhaps most, were men of little learning, not much discipline and dubious spirituality. As the clergy became inseparable from the feudal system, it became more and more difficult to maintain moral excellence at all times of great material temptations. Very large feudal estates were attached to high ecclesiastical offices, and political rather than spiritual criteria came to dictate the choice of bishops and abbots. In some places, they were appointed by the king or more powerful lords, and became almost indistinguishable from royal servants. In others, the local lord expected to install their kinsmen, not focused on the religion as much as using church property to support their family. Such conditions opened the way to "Simony" (selling Church offices to the highest bidder), or even passing them from father to son as clerics back-slid from clerical celibacy. This same malaise affected the Papacy in Rome. With Italy was a crowded hodgepodge of petty-states, Popes were elected not for their piety, but for their political ability to protect the Papal State. There were some very bad moments in the 10th century, when the Throne of St. Peter became the prize of obstreperous native Italian nobles, occasionally cut across by the interventions of the Ottonian kings. For the most part, the German candidates were better than the morally corrupt Italian power seekers. The most worst example was Pope John XII (956-963), an offensive and corrupt individual, notorious for his sexual depravity. Some in the Church were appalled by this moral decline, and general subservience to secular rulers. A monastic reform movement took off in the 960s, aimed at reintroducing a more rigorous monastic life. The most celebrated example was the Abbey of Cluny. On the edge of Burgundy, earnest monastics were able to persuade William of Aquitane (d. 918) to found the monastery on a modest scale around 910. Patrons would normally retain a proprietary interest and assert prerogatives that interfered with the operation of a monastery, but William released Cluny from all future obligation to his family, except for the monks' prayer. Importantly, the monks received the right to elect their own abbot, putting the position beyond secular interference. It helped that Cluny lay geographically in something of a power vacuum between Aquitaine and Burgundy. For nearly two-and-a-half centuries it was the heart of reform in the Church. Cluniac monks attained a high level of sustainable piety and discipline through famously strict adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict, eliminating any potential idle time by a heavy schedules of communal prayer, in addition to fieldwork and manuscript reproduction. Four of its first eight abbots were later canonised; seven were outstanding men. Its real novelty was that Cluny-based monasteries proliferated throughout France and then Western Europe, all subordinate to the Abbey of Cluny itself. To maintain unity of practice, the order had only one abbot, with other houses run by priors subordinate to him, and monks only entered their own monasteries after a period of training at the mother house. At Its height in the mid-12th-century, there were more than three hundred monasteries looking for direction to Cluny, whose abbots advised popes, acted as their legates, and threw their weight behind the spiritual reform of the Church. Cluniac monasticism entered Germany from the early 1000s, with Emperor Conrad II and his son Henry III supporting them, lending momentum to the 11th-century reform movement in the Church; later known as the Gregorian Reforms. In 1046, the Papacy faced one of its recurrent crises over who was the legitimate Pope, with three rivals contesting the pontifical honours. At the Council of Sutri (1046), Henry III deposed all the candidates, and appointed his own Pope. German kings had deposed Popes before, several times since Otto the Great first did so in 963, but Henry ensured the appointment of three Germans in succession. The last of Henry’s Popes, the longest-lived, and most effective, was Pope Leo IX (1049-54). Leo was a man of immense reforming zeal, who spent barely six months of his five years as pontiff in Rome. Instead he moved from synod to synod throughout Italy, Germany, and France, imposing standard clerical practices, punishing transgressions, and checking on secular interference. Several clerics were deposed for purchasing their office, replaced by more reform-oriented men. This was when the practice of priestly celibacy began to become more widespread; priest were formally forbidden from marrying in 1139, and reaffirmed in 1563. Leo also made strides to make the Church independent from secular rulers and Roman lay nobility by establishing the College of Cardinals as any advisory body, which he stacked with close reforming colleagues. He was fortunate that the next two papal elections would occur during the minority of Henry IV of Imperial Germany, and the cardinals seized the opportunity to elect a Pope themselves without even consulting the regents; the College thus established its central role in all future elections. Another major event of Leo's papacy was the Great Schism of 1054, the permanent sundering of Christendom into the Latin Catholic Church and Greek Orthodox Churches. On Saturday 16 July 1054, as afternoon prayers were about to begin, the papal legate sent by Pope Leo IX strode into the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and placed on the main altar a papal bull declaring the excommunication of the patriarch of Constantinople. A week later the patriarch in turn excommunicated the Pope. The immediate cause of the quarrel now seems trivial; the Normans were replacing Greek bishops with Latin ones in the wake of their conquest of southern Italy. The Great Schism of 1054 passed almost without notice by contemporary chroniclers; its significance as a turning point in East-West relations was fully realized only later. At the time, neither man probably expected it would be permanent. With hindsight the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches went their separate ways quite early in Church history. As early as the late-5th-century, Roman Christianity was somewhat estranged by the concessions the Byzantines made to accommodate their significant Monophysite minority centred on Egypt; a passionate long-running disagreement known as the Filioque Controversy about whether the Holy Spirit derives equally from the Father and the Son (Filioque being Latin for'' "from the Son"). The slow drifting apart was a product of an original distinction of style, of political history, and of the gradual loosening of contact; not surprisingly when it could take two months by sea to go from Constantinople to Rome, and by land a wedge of pagan Slav peoples long stood between them. The last emperor who came to Rome did so in 663, and the last Pope to go to Constantinople went there in 710. A distinction of style in the two traditions could be illustrated in many ways. The importance of holy men was always greater in the east than in the more hierarchically aware Roman Church. The Eastern Church saw no particular need for clerical celibacy; the Orthodox priest was never to be quite the man apart his Catholic colleague became. In the Eastern Church the congregation received both bread and wine in the communion service, while only the bread was given to the laity in the Roman Church; until the 20th century. Above all, the Roman Church had never accepted the union of religious and secular authority which was the heart of the political theory of the Byzantine Empire. Theological divergence had kept alive the question of primacy within the Church, claimed by both Rome and Constantinople. In the 7th-century, when three of the five great archbishoprics of the early Church - Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria - fell into Arab hands, this polarization was further accentuated. In the 8th-century, the Iconoclasm Controversy drove deeper the division between the churches. The Papacy, though not ''Iconodule in practice, remained firmly in support of the use of holy images. Pope Gregory III (d, 741) condemned iconoclasm outright at a synod in 731, and in retaliation Emperor Leo III transferred southern Italy, Greece and much of the Balkans from papal jurisdiction to that of Constantinople. In the 9th and 10th centuries, the separation, even hostility, of the two churches was already a fact, with missionaries from Rome clashing with their rivals from Constantinople in Eastern Europe, competing for pagan souls with their rival brands of Christianity. For instance, the Slavs of Bohemia (modern-day Czechia and Slovakia) were converted to Orthodox Christianity in the mid-9th-century been by Cyril and Methodius, but then reconverted by Germans to the Latin Church. The frontiers established in this period would remain sensitive throughout European history; today Croatia and Serbia share a language, written in the Roman script by the Croatians and in Cyrillic by the Serbians. After 1054, Popes and patriarchs continued to express the hope that reunion would be possible, but subsequent historical events worked against them. The fatal blow came in 1204, when Constantinople was taken and sacked by the Fourth Crusaders. The West could not have more brutally shown that it did not see Byzantium as a part of their civilization, nor as even a part of Christendom. The East-West schism remains to this day, though an embrace between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem in 1964 has generally been recognised as a symbolic gesture of friendship between the two Churches. At the same time, they lifted the mutual excommunications dating from the 11th century. Pope Leo IX was the first of a series of great reforming and increasingly uncompromising Popes, for whom the continued subordination of the Roman Catholic Church to secular rulers was not their intention. The so-called Investiture Controversy of 1076 was the inauguration of a great theme of Western European history, the conflict of "Church and State". A king ruled by divine right, thus claimed authority over both his own kingdom and Church within its boundaries. On the other hand, Roman Catholic doctrine asserted that the Pope should have the ultimate authority over the Church and indirectly over monarchs. On both sides of the argument, there is much that now seems repellent: the aggressive and militant form of Christianity of the Crusading Age; Popes claiming the right to depose monarchs and trying to exercise it, sometimes successfully; the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket by an English king; the abduction of Pope Boniface VIII by a French king, and the widespread persecution of Jews. It was nevertheless one of the most creative arguments of European politics, which was time and time again to pull it back into a progressive path; a challenge to unchecked power. If royal power was limited by the Papacy, what other limits might there be? Rise of the Normans The Normans had come a long way from the Viking plunderers who had been settled in northern France by Rollo in 911. In the 10th century, no one could have foreseen that the Norman would become one of the most powerful feudal states of Western Europe, going on to leave a deep imprint across the continent from the British Isles to southern Italy, and on to the Near East and Jerusalem. The immediate descendants of Rollo's Vikings and their French wives faced an uncertain future, surrounded by predatory neighbours and the French crown always looking for an excuse to reclaim its lost territory. The duchy was put on firmer footing during the long reign of Rollo's grandson, Duke Richard I (942-96). His father had been assassinated by the Normandy's most powerful neighbour, Flanders, and King Louis IV of France (936–954) overran the duchy taking Richard hostage. That would have been the end for Normandy, except the Normans did not hesitate to invite some Vikings to pillage the Seine Valley until the king got the message and released Richard. For the next 49 years, Richard was able to concentrate on reforming his realm, based on land ownership, feudal hierarchy, and efficient government. The Normans did not completely lose touch with their Viking past, and pagan warbands were long welcomed in Norman ports to overwinter and sell their booty; his fellow French nobles called Richard the Duke of the Pirates. As with everything they did, the Normans embraced Christianity with a fierce enthusiasm. His ancestors had burn monasteries, but Richard was a generous patron of the Church, and restored their lands. One of the Normans' favourite projects was the island monastery of Le Mont-Saint-Michel, which soon became one of the most spectacular examples of Norman architecture. Richard was also a key supporter of the election of Hugh Capet (987-996) to the French throne, his brother-in-law. By the end of his reign, Normandy was a fully functioning medieval state. It was under his son, Richard II (996–1026), that the Normans fully gained their identity. He closed the Norman ports to Vikings, and in exchange his sister Emma married King Ethelred II of England. He also commissioned a pro-French history of the duchy, propaganda at its finest, which portrayed his ducal ancestors as morally upright Christian leaders who built Normandy, despite the treachery of their overlords and neighboring principalities. By his death, Richard had turned around the perception of Normandy, and transformed it into one of the most powerful provinces of France; he was a personal friend of the French king, the brother-in-law of the English king. And having adapted to the French style of warfare, the Normans were becoming the most ferocious military forces in Europe; their armoured cavalry charges were virtually irresistible. Like their Viking ancestors, they displayed a love of fighting, an almost reckless courage, an extreme restlessness, and a craftiness that went hand in hand with outrageous treachery. It made them a wonderful machine for conquest. By the reign of Robert I (1027-35), Norman influence extended into neighbouring Flanders and Brittany, and when King Robert II of France (996-1031) was briefly deposed in a palace coup, it was Normandy that helped restore him to his throne. He provided the foundations for the great heights yet to come. Robert's son would become the most famous Norman in history, William the Conqueror, and Norman wanderlust, hunger for land, wealth and power would see their influence spread to across Europe and beyond. Norman Conquest of England The decades after the unification of England in 925 were a productive time for the Anglo-Saxons. A measure of administrative uniformity was gradually achieved with the entire kingdom divided into shires, boroughs, and hundreds on the pattern of those of Wessex. Moreover, the English Church experienced a remarkable surge of monasticism. It was only when ability failed in Alfred the Great’s line that the England came to grief. After several decades of relative peace, a fresh wave of Viking offensives hammered England during the reign of Ethelred II (978-1013); this was perhaps spurred by Danish King Harald Bluetooth (d. 986), who was attempting to impose Christianity upon his domain. In 991, a sizeable Danish fleet began a sustained campaign in south-eastern England, easily defeating the English forces sent against them at the Battle of Maldon (August 991). In the aftermath, Ethelred began to pay an annual bribe (Danegeld) to the Danes. The judgement of history has not been kind to Ethelred; he has been known as Ethelred the Unready ever since. This is somewhat unfair since many of his predecessors, including the vaunted Alfred himself, had paid such bribes, but the sums involved were now colossal. This was neither popular with his subjects, nor an effective solution since it only encouraged the Danes to come back for more. Meanwhile, the Viking were still getting a friendly reception just across the Channel in Normandy. Desperate to close the Norman ports to them, Ethelred agreed to marry Emma of Normandy, sister of Duke Richard II (d. 1026), in return for shutting the door to the Vikings. Alas, this diplomatic triumph went straight to his head, and the king ordered the St. Brice's Day Massacre (November 1002), the death of all Danish men in England. It is said that the sister of King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark (d. 1014) was among the victims. The inevitable response came in 1013, when Sweyn personally led an invasion of England, intend on claiming the to crown himself. He found an expectedly easy conquest; the English were tired of their weak king, and Sweyn, as a Christian, was not met with the usual suspicion accorded a Viking. By the end of the year, the Danish was sitting on the English throne, and Ethelred was living in exile with his wife's family in Normandy. The situation suddenly changed when Sweyn Forkbeard died only five weeks later, and Ethelred returned to England, confronted by Sweyn's son and successor, Cnut. However, by 1016 Ethelred and his eldest son were dead, and Cnut the Great (1016-35) was crowned king of England. To remove the threat of Norman support for Ethelred's other sons, Cnut married his widow, Emma of Normandy. There thus emerged the complex family links between the Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Danish royal families; the future King Edward the Confessor had Cnut as a stepfather and Richard II of Normandy as an uncle. By all accounts, Cnut ruled England both wisely and well, although this view may in part be attributable to his stout supporter of the Church, keeper of the historical record. Under Cnut, England became briefly part of a great Danish empire, that eventually included Norway and Sweden too. These campaigns abroad meant the prows of Viking longships were turned on Scandinavia, and there was peace in England. Moreover, cities such as London and York flourished during this period of dominance over the Baltic Sea and North Sea, and on to Ireland, where the Danes still had a strong interests, even after the Battle of Clontarf. With such a vast realm, Cnut naturally delegated considerable power to the Anglo-Saxon families who had earned his trust, placing excessive power in the hands of a few great noblemen, chief among them Earl Godwin of Wessex (d. 1053). When Cnut died in 1035, there was no attempt to restore the Anglo-Saxon line, and he was succeeded by his two natural sons, Harold Harefoot (d. 1040) and Harthacnut (d. 1042). However, both reigns were short-lived, and the crown eventually passed to Cnut's stepson, Edward the Confessor (1042-66), natural son of Ethelred the Unready. It is easy to regard the years of Edward’s reign as a prelude to the three-way succession crisis of 1066: Danish King Magnus (d. 1047) was prevented from pressing his claim to England by troubles at home, a claim later inherited by Harald Hardrada; the man who became better known as William the Conqueror was only 14-years-old; and the major troubles of his reign came from Earl Godwin of Wessex. Throughout Cnut's rule, Edward had lived in exile at the Norman court, and when he returned to England as king he brought several Norman relatives and friends into his administration, annoying the great Anglo-Saxon nobles. A crisis arose in 1051, when the king appointed a Norman clergyman as archbishop of Canterbury, over a relative of Earl Godwin. When Godwin subsequently defied a royal order, Edward tried to bring his over-mighty vassal to heel, but the Godwines proved too powerful and their followers too loyal for the king to sideline them for any length of time. After Earl Godwin's death in 1053, his son Harold Godwinson (d. 1066) took the family to even greater heights by proving himself a good soldier, defeating King Gruffydd ap Llywelyn of Wales. Meanwhile, Edward failed to produce an heir, and an English succession crisis loomed. The traditional explanation is that Edward was pious and had taken a vow of chastity, though this is largely based on a biography commissioned by his widow, who would have good reason to promoting the idea that the childless marriage was no her fault. Edward the Confessor died in January 1066, and was, appropriately enough, buried in the magnificent new cathedral he had founded, Westminster Abbey; it was built on the same design as Jumièges Abbey in Normandy. On his deathbed, Edward probably named Earl Harold Godwinson of Wessex his successor, who was universally accepted by the great Anglo-Saxon nobles, and crowned the next day, Harold II Godwinson (January-October 1066). However, two of the most powerful rulers in Europe also had claims to the English throne, both highly dubious. The first claimant King Harald Hardrada of Norway (d. 1066) certainly had an impressive career. At fifteen years old, Harald fought at the Battle of Stiklestad (1030), where his brother, King Olaf Haraldsson of Norway, ultimately lost his crown to Cnut the Great. Forced into exile, he spent some time as a mercenary for the Kievan Rus', before moving on to Constantinople where he rose to become commander of the Varangian Guard. After becoming extremely rich serving the Byzantines with distinction, he returned to Scandinacia in 1046 to regain for himself the kingdom lost by his brother. However, in his absence, the Norwegian throne had already been recovered by Olaf's son, Magnus. Undeterred, Harald contested the crown, until Magnus, unwilling to fight his uncle, agreed to share the kingship. The co-rule ended abruptly less than a year later with Magnus' death, and Harald went on to rule Norway alone for the next 20 years with considerable success. Harald's claim to the English crown was based on a supposed promise by Cnut's son Harthacnut to restore the earlier Anglo-Scandinavian empire. Harald also claimed the Danish throne, and had spent nearly every year until 1064 fighting Sweyn II of Denmark (d. 1076). Harald Hardrada would, of course, ultimately lose out in 1066 to the second claimant, William the Conqueror. The succession of any medieval ruler was always an invitation to chaos, and that of William the Conqueror (1035-87) more than most. William had to overcome enormous obstacles; he was illegitimate, the only son of Duke Robert I of Normandy (1027-35), and became duke at just eight-years-old. With a child on the throne, Normandy gradually descended into anarchy, as nobles carved out virtually independent fiefdoms for themselves, building unauthorised castles and waging private wars throughout the province. His relatives and advisers were of little help, fighting among themselves for preeminence and treating William as a pawn. Three of William’s guardians and his tutor died violent deaths, and the young duke narrowly escaped assassination on more than one occasion. In 1042, William was fifteen-years-old, by the standards of the time a man, and ready to assert himself in the affairs of his duchy. It is not surprising that William would emerge as a formidable personality; he must have had reserves of strength to survive such a childhood. He had no patience for the fractious guardians who had held the reins of power for him. Dismissing them, he surrounded himself with new advisors, mostly young and talented individuals who would stay with him for the rest of his life, and become in time some of the largest landowners in England. William's attempt to bring his disobedient vassals to heel inevitably led a series of rebellions, and the period from 1046 until 1055 saw almost continuous warfare. The making of the young duke was victory over a coalition of Norman rebels at the Battle of Val-ès-Dunes (1047), in which he allied with King Henry I of France (1031-1060); the French crown had good reason to want a weak duke propped-up by royal power. Afterwards, William held a great peace council near the site of the battle, where the assembled nobles swore solemn oaths, endorsed by the Church, to respect the duke's peace. The next few years saw him slowly and methodically recover his lost ducal prestige, rights, and revenues, and by the 1050s, he was able to participate in events outside his duchy. In 1051, he married Matilda of Flanders, a formidable personality in her own right, who brought him a powerful ally; uncharacteristically for a Norman duke, they would remain faithful to each other their whole lives. At first the Pope forbade the marriage because the pair were distant cousins, but they got married anyway and then did penance, commissioning the twin cathedrals, the Abbaye aux Hommes and Abbaye aux Dames in Caen. In support of King Henry, William also fought a series of campaigns against the growing power of the Count of Anjou. But alliances quickly shifted in feudal Europe. Now threatened by William's growing mastery of his duchy, Henry and Anjou reconciled in 1054, and launched an invasion of Normandy. The invasion was particularly ill-timed for William, coinciding with yet another rebellion by two of his uncles. William decided on a policy of falling back and bidding his time. Meeting little resistance, the king was lulled into complacency, and the Normans were able to launch a surprise attack in the middle of the night at the Battle of Morteme (1054), that prompted Henry to withdraw in dismay with heavy losses. The rebellion also collapsed, leaving William in complete mastery of Normandy, with a fearsome military reputation to boot. But King Henry wasn't finished. He again marched into Normandy in 1057, intent on bringing this upstart duke to heel. William refused to engage his overlord, until an opportunity presented itself as the royal army was crossing the Dives River. With half the army across, he pounced and Henry was forced to watch impotently from the other side as the disastrous Battle of Varaville (August 1057) unfolded. Three years later, the king was dead, and eight-year-old Philip I of France (1060-1108) was on the throne, under the guardianship of William’s father-in-law, Robert of Flanders. The Count of Anjou were also dead, and Anjou descended into civil war, which William took advantage of by seizing Maine in 1063. For the first time in his life, William was free from external threats and secure in one of the richest duchies in northern France. Brimming with confidence, he turned his eyes across the Channel, at the largest centralised states in Western Europe. William's claim to the English throne was dubious at best: he was a first cousin of Edward the Confessor through his great aunt, Emma of Normandy; he claimed the English king, who he had known since childhood, once promised him the throne; and also claimed that when Harold Godwinson was in Normandy probably to secure the release of his imprisoned brother, he had sworn an oath on holy relics to support William’s claim, no doubt under duress. As soon as Harold was crown, William began preparing a full-scale military invasion of England, gathering an army perhaps 8,000 strong including 2,000 cavalry, and a fleet of 400 ships. In England, King Harold Godwinson assembled his own army on the south coast, but the invasion when came, arrived not from Normandy, but from the north. Without warning King Harald Hardrada of Norway (1046-66) invaded northern England to press his own claim to the English throne. He easily overran the local forces, and seized York. However King Harold Godwinson acted decisively, force-marching his army 200-miles north in an astonishing four days. The sudden appearance of the English army caught the Norwegians completely by surprise. Hardrada should have retreated to his ship to regroup, but his blood was up, and he charged into the Battle of Stamford Bridge (September 1066). Even with half his army and ill-prepared, the Norwegians were a formidable foes, and the battle raged for hours, but in the end Harald along with most of the Norwegians were killed; of 240 ships, only 24 were needed to carry the survivors back to Norway. This battle is sometimes used to mark the end of the Viking Age. There was little time to savoir the victory. Just three days later, William of Normandy landed his own invasion force unopposed on the south coast, after a string of delays and unfavourable winds. Repeating his epic march, Harold Godwinson was back in London within four days to plan the defence of the realm. In was only then that the exhausted Harold got word that William had brought with him both the holy relics Harold had been force to swear upon in Normandy, and a papal bull giving the Pope's blessing to William's invasion; the Norman had always been fervent supported of the Church. On Saturday 14 October 1066, a single battle between less than 20,000 men would changed the course of history in England and beyond; the Battle of Hastings (October 1066). The English soldiers formed-up on foot as a shield wall, the traditional way of fighting, tried and tested over the centuries. Confronting them was something startlingly new in English warfare, a Norman army consisting of mounted cavalry, infantry, and archers; roughly proportioned 1-2-1. Yet against all expectations, Harold's shield-wall held and William's army was thrown back again and again. Both sides suffered heavy casualties; Harold's two brothers were killed and William had three horse cut from under him. But as the day wore on, Norman archers and cavalry charges began to take their tole, and the shield-wall began to shrink in on itself. Then in the late afternoon, a chance arrow struck and killed Harold Godwinson; the Bayeux tapestry is the only evidence for the tradition that it hit him in the eye. When Harold's standard fell, the end came quickly; the wall broke and a route ensuing. With no one of stature remaining to raise a new army, William the Conqueror (1066-87) met little resistance on his march to London, where he was crowned king at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. The new cathedral had had an eventful first year, with one royal funeral and two coronations. William secured his new kingdom with exemplary thoroughness. The conquest was not achieved at a single stroke, and major uprisings continued for several years: the sons of Harold Godwinson tried to invade several times from exile in Ireland; a cousin of Edward the Confessor fled into exile in Scotland and stirred up trouble to the north; and guerilla fighters like the legendary Hereward the Wake repeatedly tried to throw-off the "Norman Yoke". The most serious resistance was in the north, where the people were much more bound to Scandinavia than Normandy. The Normans brutally suppressed the rebels by starving them into submission with the so-called Harrying of the North (1069–71), laying waste to the northern countryside. According to the chronicles, William celebrated Christmas of 1070 in the ruins of York. William used these revolts as an excuse to confiscate English land and distributed it among his Norman followers, serving the king in a network of feudal obligations. The Church elite did not escape notice either, with almost all bishops being replaced by Norman ones. To secure his hold on the country, the English landscape was soon transformed by the construction of hundreds of wooden motte-and-bailey castles. These were unlike anything seen in England before, for Anglo-Saxon fortifications were walled towns to shelter the people from Viking raiders. Norman castles were compact military bases designed to defend the power of the new ruling class. Many of these castles would later be replaced by monumental towers of stone, among them the central keep of the Tower of London, the White Tower. By 1080, the Norman conquest of England was celebrated as a fait accompli, with the commissioning of the exceptional Bayeux Tapestry. Good administration required detailed information about the country, thus William carried out one of the most remarkable administrative accomplishments of the Middle Ages, the compilation of a vast survey of England for royal purposes.The listing for each county gives all the landholdings of each noble, who owned the land before the conquest, its value, its tax assessment, and the number of peasants, ploughs, and any other resources; towns were listed separately. The document acquired the colloquial name ''Domesday Book ''(1086), a''n allusion to the ''Day of Judgement because the commissioners’ findings were final. Domesday starkly reveals the almost total replacement of the Anglo-Saxon ruling-class by a much smaller number of Normans: William and his close family directly possessed about 20% of the land in England; 50% was held by vassals of the crown; 25% was in the hands of the Christian Church; and leaving a bare 5% to the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobility. Some Anglo-Saxon nobles fled into exile in Scotland, notably Margaret of Wessex who married King Malcolm III Dunkeld of Scotland (1058-93), and worked tirelessly to make it a more unified and centralised kingdom capable of resisting conquest from the south. The Byzantine Empire became another popular destination for Anglo-Saxon exiles, as the empire was in need of mercenaries. To his English subjects, William remained a foreign tyrant throughout his reign. It seems the feeling was reciprocated, for he never bothered to learn the language, and spent as much time as he dared at home in Normandy. On his death in 1087, William divided his three sons. Tellingly, to his eldest son he left his favourite part, the Duchy of Normandy, while the throne of England went to his younger son. Strong centralised government continued under William's two sons, William II (1087-1100) and Henry I (1100-1135). It was often a harsh rule, but there was also a sense of fair dealing. A charter of liberties was issued on the coronation of Henry I that laid-out various commitment regarding the treatment of his nobles and church officials; it has been seen as a precursor of Magna Carta a century later. Nevertheless, royal authority was absolute, with central government steadily strengthen with additional institutions. England was already developing under the Anglo-Saxons into a sophisticated kingdom but Norman rule certainly accelerated that process. The royal exchequer began to develop from 1110, used to collect and audit revenues from the king's sheriffs and royal officials from all over England; the name refers to the chequer-pattern counting cloth used to perform calculations. Circuit court justices with wide-ranging powers were sent out into the shires to inspect local courts, to hear appeals to the crown, to visit the holdings of any vassal, and other matters of interest or profit for the king. The impact of Norman rule on English society is difficult to assess. One of the more obvious effects was the introduction of French as the language of the ruling classes, and had a lasting influence on English syntax and vocabulary. Thousands of French words would eventually enter the English language, which is why the modern language has so many different words with the same meaning, such as "royal" from the French and "king" from the Old English, or "beef" from the French and "cow" from the Old English, or "amorous" from the French and "loving" from the Old English. Another shift was the usage of names common in France. Today Anglo-Saxon names such as Egbert, Athelstan, and Ethelred sound strange, while Norman names like William, Robert and Richard seem quintessentially English. The English Church was also brought more fully into line with developments on the Continent: the first reforming Cluniac monastery was established at Lewes in 1077; and new stone cathedrals were built in the Norman-Romanesque style such as at Winchester, York, and Canterbury. Finally, Henry reunited his fathers realm encompassing England and Normandy in 1106, after a series of violent struggles with his brothers; he probably assassinated his brother William on a hunting trip, and overthrew his brother Robert at the Battle of Tinchebray (September 1106) who spent the rest of his life imprisoned. But the Duke of Normandy had always been the vassal of the French king, and the fact that they were kings of England in their own rights didn't change that. In the coming centuries, the politics, economics, and cultures of England and Franch became intertwined with sometimes drastic consequences, especially when the French monarchy began to reassert itself in the 13th-century. The roots of Hundred Years’ War in the 14th-century can be traced back to the Norman conquest of England. William's sons worked harder to smooth the differences between Anglo-Saxon and Norman societies; Henry married the daughter of an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman and the Scottish king, and encouraged men at court to marry English women. Gradually the cultural differences between the Normans and Anglo-Saxons evaporated: when the Normans settled in France in 911, they were Vikings; when they conquered England in 1066, they were Frenchmen; and in 1169 when they would invade Ireland, they were Englishmen. But the direct line of William the Conquerors only lasted his two sons: William II was probably homosexual and Henry I's only legitimate son died in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120. When Henry died in 1035, the result was a period of civil war known as The Anarchy. Norman Conquest of Southern Italy Viewed on the map, the Italian peninsula seems the most natural of locations for a single kingdom; or the secure heart of an empire as in Roman time. It was protected from mainland Europe by the Alps, and on all other sides by the sea. Yet, its geographical position had had precisely the opposite effect. Constantly nibbled at by its neighbours, by the 9th century, Italy was a crowded and ever-shifting hodgepodge of rival petty-states. The north was nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire, but Germany was the real basis of their kingship, and they rarely visited Italy except to be crowned. The south was shared the remnants of Justinian's Byzantine holdings and Lombard duchies. The one stable element was the Papal State, running across the middle of the peninsula from Rome and Ravenna. Over the whole fell the shadow of Islamic raids up-and-down the coast, while the Arabs completed the conquest of Sicily in 902 and went on to rule it for a century and a half with profound effects. All of Mediterranean Europe had a complex relationship with the Arabs, who appeared to them as traders in fine goods, as often as freebooters. The 11th-century signalled the end of italy's darkest period. The destructive raids of Magyars (Hungarians) ended after the Battle of Lechfeld, and Mediterranean trade slowly picked up thanks largely to the Byzantines; under the Macedonian Dynasty, Byzantium enjoyed an economic boom, and the imperial navy clearing the seas of pirates. Italy developed a peculiar political pattern, significantly different from feudal Europe north of the Alps. The High Middle Ages saw a steady rise in prosperity throughout Europe, but one of the first regions to prosper was northern Italy, on the trade route between the eastern Mediterranean and northern Europe, with goods landing at Venice and other ports for the journey through the passes of the Alps, north to Germany or west to France. This led to a rebirth of the old Roman cities, and the establishment of new ones. Yet northern Italy was politically insecure, squeezed between the rival claims of imperial Germany to the north and the Papal States to the south. Prosperous but threatened, the cities sought greater control of their own destiny, enclosing themselves in strong walls, adopting an increasingly independent stance, and developing strong civic councils known as communes. These communes were chosen in a variety of ways, but usually deliberately excluded the nobility, resulting in extremely effective oligarchies of the merchant class; in the early years there were experiments with popular assemblies, but these glimmers of democracy was soon extinguished in favour of a few affluent families. Meanwhile the cities extended their control over the surrounding countryside, becoming City-States. The first of Italy's medieval cities to prosper were those which grew rich through maritime trade, among them the Maritime Republics of Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi. Luxury goods bought in the Near East such as spices, dyes, and silks were imported to Italy and then resold throughout Europe. Moreover, the inland city-states such as Florence, Milan, Naples, and Siena profited their position on trade routes, from the rich agricultural land, and their industrious merchant community. The Crusading Age would be the making of Italy. The wars created a constant demand for transportation, naval support, and supplies. More importantly, the maritime republics built lasting trade links throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Fourth Crusade destroyed the Byzantine Empire as a commercial rival. 13th-century Italy would be one of the richest regions of Europe. The 11th-century was a turbulent period for southern Italy, even by Italian standards. After the death of Basil II (d. 1025), Byzantine influence went into sharp decline, and southern Italy became torn-apart by war as the Lombards, Muslims, Germans, and the Papacy sought to take advantage. Yet it was a group of newcomers who most benefited from this chaos; the Normans. The Norman conquest of southern Italy is all the more remarkable for being largely led by a single family, that of a simple knight called Tancred de Hauteville. Virtually nothing is known about Tancred himself, other than that he had twelve sons, and not nearly enough of an inheritance to go around. The family was no doubt aware that the political situation in southern Italy was a golden opportunity for mercenaries, since Norman pilgrims had long been frequent visitors to the region to worship at the shrine to the Archangel Michael in Monte Gargano; the warrior saint was of special importance to the Normans. The first Norman mercenaries arrived in southern Italy around 1000, fighting for all sides, though the Lombards usually made the most generous employers. The first of the Hauteville brothers to make his name in Italy, William, arrived in 1035. He and other Normans fought first for the Byzantines against Muslims, then for the Lombards against the Byzantines, and by 1042 had been granted the lands around Melfi as a fief; later the Duchy of Apulia and Calabria. At first the local population greeted the Normans as liberators, eager to escape the Byzantine tax-collectors, but they soon discovered the rapacious Normans were a good deal worse, squeezing their provinces for every drop of money and acting little better than brigands. Eventually tales of plundering, robbery, murder, and rape provoked a response from the most powerful figure in Italy, Pope Leo IX. He alone had the prestige to pull the scattered powers of Italy into an alliance to drive-off the Normans. Leo led the army himself but suffered total defeat at the Battle of Civitate (June 1053). After the battle, the Pope was treated with every deference, but was no less a prisoner of the Normans; the Normans' religious fervor rarely got in the way of their driving ambition. He was held for nine months until he acknowledged the Norman's conquests in Apulia and Calabria. By now, it had become clear that in terms of brute strength and fighting ability, the Normans were without peer; they lacked only an ambitious ruler who could exploit it. Norman Italy found just such a man in Robert "Guiscard" Hauteville (d. 1085). He had arrived in Italy in 1047 with only 35 men, and, displaying the cunning that would earn him the nickname Guiscard ("the fox"), managed to capture a castle in Apulia. Over the next 20-years, Guiscard proved himself one of the most brilliant generals the Normans ever produced. With Byzantine power in Italy in the midst of a spectacular collapse, one town after another was over overwhelmed by the Normans, submitted without a fight, or fell prey to clever ruses. In 1071, Guiscard took Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold in Italy, bringing to an end forever the presence of the Roman Empire on Italian shores. By then, the Normans were already looking beyond Italy to Muslim Sicily. At the time Sicily was ripe for conquest, racked by turmoil between warring Arab and Moorish factions. Robert first invaded Sicily in 1061, establishing a foothold in Messina, and defeating a Muslim army at the Battle of Cerami (June 1063) to secure it. But Sicily was a difficult island to conquer, and it was a slow and gruelling campaign. The great city of Palermo was first besieged in 1064, but the Normans made their camp on a hillside infested with tarantulas, and the campaign had to be abandoned. The city finally fell in 1072, and for the rest of Sicily it was only then a matter of time: the stronghold of Trapani fell in 1077; Syracuse capitulated in 1086; and the conquest of Sicily was complete when Noto yielded In February 1091. Roger I Hauteville (d. 1101), the first ruler of Norman Sicily (1071-1198), set the pattern that would characterise it until the early 13th-century. He had conquered the island for Latin Christianity, but continued the Muslim tradition of tolerance for all faiths. Almost unrivalled in medieval Europe, except for Spain, Latin Christians, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Jews interacted on a regular basis in Sicily, and found employment in the administration. The vitality of this multi-cultural melting-pot is evident in exquisite architecture, such as the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. The chapel harmoniously encapsulates a variety of styles: the walls are covered in bright pictorial mosaic in the Byzantine tradition; the vaulted ceiling, carved and painted with intricate patterns is typical of Muslim design; and the sturdy round arches supporting the walls are from Norman Romanesque. Sicily also became a great centre of learning, producing such wonders as the Tabula Rogeriana ''("''The Book of Roger"), a world atlas with illustrations and commentaries by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi (d. 1165). It remained the most accurate map of the world until the Age of Discovery, and contained such details as dual sources of the Nile, the coast of Ghana, the caste system of India and rice cultivation in China. The map was commissioned by Roger II Hauteville (1105-54), who by his death had succeeded in uniting all the Norman lands in Italy into a single kingdom with a strong centralized government. The Norman conquests had been an unplanned and chaotic affair, with the Normans (and even the Hauteville brothers) constantly quarreling among themselves, and conquering territories independently as separate duchies and counties. In 1130, Roger's realm encompassing Sicily and southern Italy was elevated to royal rank as a kingdom. The example of the powerful kingdom carved-out in Italy by a few thousand Norman knights of lowly birth did not go unnoticed by the Crusaders. In the early 13th-century, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II spent much time in Sicily studying its sophisticated Muslim-style administrative structure, which some historians consider the first true bureaucratic state in Western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Imperial Germany and the Church The Holy Roman Empire in 1000 was by far the largest and militarily strongest Western power, encompassing what is now Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, as well as parts of eastern France, northern Italy, and western Poland. The Saxon dynasty of Otto the Great petered-out in 1024, but was followed by a female-line branch of the family, the Salian Dynasty (1024-1125) of Franconia in the Rhinelands. The first two Salian emperors, Conrad II (1024-37) and Henry III (1037–56), managed to keep their royal hegemony solid. Yet the curious federal structure of great duchies remained, and rested not on government or administration, but on the manipulation of factions against one another. It seems significant that the Salians needed to move around their kingdom much more than the Ottonians or Carolingians, simply to make their presence felt directly. Conversely, they shifted aristocrats around far less. Though the Salians successfully maintained the tradition of exercising power south of the Alps, by now emperors rarely went there except to be crowned. Then there is the paradox of an elected overlord, which in the brutal reality of feudal politics usually meant concessions to keep voters onside. An emperor could not nominate his successor without the approval of the German magnates, thus a stable dynasty could never emerge. Like the Ottonians, the Salians continued to build the German Church as a vehicle for imperial control, favouring bishops over secular nobles for important post across the empire. They often determined who would be appointed to high clerical offices, and the Popes themselves seemed to become mere imperial bishops; dismissed at will and replaced them with candidates more to their liking. For all that, they were the Church’s protector who thought they knew what was best for it, not its governor; a protector the Papacy had less and less need of, now that the Lombards and Magyars had been pacified. From the middle of the 11th-century, royal hegemony weakened fast. Henry III (1046-1056) was a devout Christian, deeply concerned with the spiritual health of the Church, and lent his support so-called Gregorian Reform movement; Pope Leo IX (1049-54), the first of the series of great reforming Popes who was oversee it, was one of Henry's nominees. However, when Henry died unexpected at the age-of-40 and was succeeded by his young son Henry IV (1056-1105), the initiative passed to the Papacy. During Henry IV's decade-long minority, the regency could not control the election of Popes, and the idea of a Church independent from secular rulers gathered pace. The battle lines of what would become known as Investiture Controversy '''(1076-1122) were clearly drawn under Pope Nicholas II (1059-61). At the synod held in 1059, Nicholas condemned various abuses within the Church, including simony (the selling of clerical offices), the marriage of clergy, and most controversially reformed the practices of papal elections. Henceforth, the College of Cardinals alone could choose a Pope; imperial influence was clearly his target, for the emperor was left with a nominal veto, nothing more. Meanwhile, the Pope took steps to enlist new allies to protect the papacy. In 1053, Pope Leo IX had taken-up arms to try and drive the Normans from southern Italy, now just six years later Nicholas granted them territorial rights in return for feudal obligations to Rome. Perhaps the emperors were bound to find themselves in conflict with the papacy sooner or later, once it ceased to be in need of their protection against other enemies. Ostensibly the Investiture Controversy centred on whether secular overlords had the authority to “invest” bishops and abbots within their domains; that is, to appoint them and formally give them the robes and insignia of office. At its heart, however, lay the idea of an independent Church, and the struggles for power between the papacy and secular rulers. The overtly political struggle against the German emperor was brought to a head by '''Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). Gregory was far from attractive as a person, but a Pope of great personal and moral courage. He fought all his life for the independence and dominance of the papacy within western Christendom, and was a lover of decisive action without too nice a regard for possible consequences. Once elected, Gregory took the papal throne without imperial assent, simply informing the emperor of the fact. Two years later he issued a decree that forbade any layman from investing a cleric with a bishopric or other ecclesiastical office. The appointment of high clergy was far too valuable a right to be easily relinquished by secular rules, for clerics as the best educated members of medieval society were an important part of any administration. Furthermore, the predecessors of Henry IV had showered vast feudal wealth on the bishoprics and abbeys; the Church would thus be freed from the royal obligations without losing any of its benefits. From a series of threatening letters, the situation quickly escalated: Gregory excommunicated some clerical members of the imperial court accusing them of simony, and Henry installed a new bishop of Milan when another priest had already been chosen by the Pope for candidacy. In January 1076, Henry took the dramatic step of summoning a synod of German bishops to declare Gregory deposed. This earned him excommunication, which would have been a serious matter, even if Henry's opportunistic vassals had not seized this opportunity to justify a general revolt; the Great Saxon Revolt (1077-88). The end result was that Henry had to give way. In one of the most dramatic of all confrontations of secular and spiritual authority, Henry came in humiliation to Canossa, where he waited in the snow barefoot for three days and nights until Gregory would receive his penance. But Gregory had not really won, his position was too extreme; he claim the right to depose a monarch, yet he himself should be judged by none. This was almost unthinkably subversive to men whose moral horizons were dominated by the idea of the sacredness of oaths of fealty. Both William the Conqueror of England and Philip II of France made their feeling abundantly clear by insisting they would not refrain from investing bishops with their offices. And despite his difficulties, Emperor Henry IV was far from beaten. He held a geographically central position that prevented his enemies from uniting to destroy him. With the death of his Rudolf of Rheinfelden at the Battle on the Elster (October 1080), the rebellion against Henry lost much of its momentum. In 1081, Henry marched on Rome, which he intermittently besieged for three years, before entering the city with his own Pope. Meanwhile, Gregory, safe in his virtually impregnable fortress of the Castel Sant'Angelo, appealed to the Normans to restore him to the papacy. The imperial forces withdrew from the city before they arrived in May 1084, but the Normans, seeing Rome defenseless, sacked the city so violently that Gregory had to flee south with his rescuers; he died a year later in Sicily. While Pope Gregory's successors acted less dramatically, the Investiture Controversy continued for several decades, providing the pretext for internal revolts that gradually took their toll. A compromise was eventually reached in the Concordat of Worms (1122), that established a subtle distinction between the spiritual and secular elements of high clerical offices. Although diplomatically disguised, it was clearly a Papal victory; the Church would henceforth be an independent institution, and the early-medieval equilibrium had been shattered. The dispute did not end with Worms, and more would be heard over the next two centuries of Papal claims of moral authority to rival that of the traditional secular powers. Excommunication became a familiar theme of European politics, and there was another spectacular quarrel in England that ended with the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. Pope Urban II used the First Crusade to become the diplomatic figurehead of Europe’s monarchs; they now looked to Rome, not the Holy Roman Empire. It was only in the 13th-century, that the ascendancy of the Papacy finally met its match in a clash with King Philip IV of France. In the meantime, the challenge thrown out by the Church forced secular rulers to seek new foundations for their position, spurring the develop of truly bureaucratic states. For the Holy Roman Empire, the clash with the Papacy had demonstrated the limits of imperial power, robbed the imperial title of much of the great prestige it had previously enjoyed, and allowed the Pope and German princes to become major political players within the empire. In the coming centuries, political circumstances led the gradually political fragmentation of imperial Germany into a tapestry of feudal states, with the holder of the imperial crown as little more than a figurehead. The Spanish Reconquest The origins of medieval Christian Spain lay in fugitive Visigothic nobles, who, in the face of the Muslim conquest of the early-8th-century, had clung-on in the mountainous northern fringe of the peninsula, alongside the ever independent Basques. Aided by the establishment of a Frankish March around Barcelona by Charlemagne in the early-9th-century, Christianity, above all, was the crucible of nationhood for Spain, with one national aspiration; to reconquer their Spanish fatherland and make the Cross triumph over the Crescent. The ''Reconquista (718-1492) would take almost eight centuries of stirring victories, grievous reverses, and missed opportunities, during which the different Christian kingdoms were almost as often at war with each other as with Muslims. One key ingredient was provided by the cult of Santiago, the apostle St. James. James suffered martyrdom in Jerusalem in 44 AD, but the saint's supposed tomb was miraculously discovered in north-western Spain in about 820. The city of Santiago de Compostela grew around the site, becoming the third-most-popular medieval Christian pilgrimage goal, after Rome and Jerusalem, and opening a crucial channel of communication between isolated northern Spain and the rest of Christendom. St. James became the special protector of soldiers in the ''Reconquista, ''and is today the patron saint of Spain. The early reconquest was a stuttering affair. The Christians nibbled away successfully at Umayyad Spain (756-1031) whenever it was distracted by internal problems, only for the territories to be lost again. It was further complicated by a high degree of positive culture contact between Spain Christians and Muslims; as well as Jews, for there were many living in Spain. Christian kingdoms needed to maintain good relations with their Muslim neighbours in order to survive, while the Islamic world was remarkable for its tolerance of religious and ethnic minorities. Within Muslim Spain, Arabic sources mark clear that Christians often held high offices. Indeed one fanatical group of Christians was so upset at the contented attitude of their fellow Christians under Islamic rule, that they martyred themselves in the marketplace in Cordoba in about 850. Muslim Spain was of enormous importance to Europe, a door to the learning and science of the East; as was Norman Sicily. These included Latin translations of the Greek Classics and of Arabic texts on astronomy, mathematics, science, and medicine, as well as more immediately practical knowledge of agricultural techniques, such as crop rotation, improved animal husbandry, better irrigation, and the diffusion of new crops. The blackest moment for the Christians came in the late-10th-century, when the fearsome Muslim general al-Mansur (d. 1002) terrorised the north, sacking Barcelona in 985, Leon in 988, and the great cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela in 997. Muslim Spain looked as if it might move further still, to cover the whole peninsula; this did not happen. The Caliph and al-Mansur's inept son lost control of their Moorish soldiers and angered their Arab aristocracy; a coup in 1009 led to the deposition of the former and murder of the latter. The uprising ushered in some 20 years of unrest, allowing the Christian states to breathe easily again. In the 11th-century, religious fervour entered both camps. The first Cluniac monastery west of Barcelona was established at San Juan de la Peña in 1024. These reforming monks were not as impressed with Muslim grandeur as the Spanish had often been, and Spain became characterised by the same uncompromising and militant form of Christianity as the rest of Europe. Meanwhile, by 1031, the Umayyad Caliphate had splintered into dozens of Muslim principalities known as ''Taifas that competed against one another. The Taifas have long been seen as a sign of political failure, but were in fact very successful and effective petty-kingdoms for the most part. The period generated a sophisticated intellectual and cultural discourse, drawing upon a rich variety of political experience; recalling Ancient Greek or medieval Italian city-states. It produced one of the most interesting practical political treatises of medieval Europe, the Tibyan: Memoirs of Abd Allah al-Ziri (1094); we would not see such political awareness in Christian Europe until The Prince by Machiavelli (d. 1527). Yet the Taifas were of course poor at defending themselves, and the Christian kingdoms advanced further. Most spectacularly Alfonso VI of Castile (d. 1109) took Toledo in 1085, ancient seat of the Visigothic Kingdom. The fall of one of their richest cities sent a shockwave through Muslim Spain, and provoked a response; taifa rulers sent a desperate appeal to the powerful Almoravid Sultanate (1147-1145) of Morocco. The Almoravids trace their origin to Moorish tribesmen of the north-west African interior, who had converted to Islam in the 8th-century, and then prospered on the lucrative trans-Saharan trade-route. On a pilgrimage to Mecca around 1035, their chieftain discovered to his dismay that their faith had diverged considerably from orthodox Islam, and returned with a theologian called Abdallah ibn Yasin to preach the true faith. Yasin had an exceptionally strict interpretation of Islam. Fired by a new religious zeal, they founded the city of Marrakech in 1062, and over the next twenty years conquer a vast territory stretching from Tunisia to Algeria, aided by the power vacuum in north-west Africa after the Fatimid Dynasty moved east to Egypt. With strictly disciplined armies of hardened desert warriors, the Almoravids arrived in Spain in 1086, and decisively defeated Alfonso VI at the Battle of Sagrajas (October 1086). The battleground was later called az-Zallaqah ("slippery ground") because of the tremendous amount of blood shed on both sides that day. Almoravid losses meant that they were unable to follow-up the victory by recovering Toledo, but the Christian advance was halted for several generations. Only on the east coast was the Muslim resurgence challenged by the buccaneering exploits of Rodrigo Diaz (d. 1099), known even in his own day as El Cid (Old Castilian for "lord"). Although hailed as one of the great Christian heroes of the reconquest, for most of his life El Cid fought with equal enthusiasm for rulers of either religion. In 1094, he took the great Muslim city of Valencia, which he ruled for five years, though it lay deep in Muslim territory. El Cid remained undefeated in battle until his death, and his family had to abandon Valencia in 1102; it would not become a Christian city again for 125 years. Though stricter in their faith than the Umayyads, the Almoravid Sultans largely continued the traditions of Muslim Spain, but gradually forgot the harsh desert life for the comforts of the city. They eventually lost control of their entire empire to another Moorish dynasty, the Almohad Sultanate (1121–1269). With an even more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. they conquered Morocco by 1147, the rest of north-west Africa by 1159, and all of Muslim Spain was firmly under their control by 1172. Not until the Almohads were defeated an alliance of the Christian princes at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) was Muslim Spain’s survival seriously at risk, and even then it took nearly 300 years more for it to vanish entirely. Rise of the Muslim Seljuk Turks For centuries, the nomads of Central Asia were a source of impetus in world history, producing such wide-ranging results as the Germanic invasions of the West, the menacing and revitalizing of China, and the Silk Road trade routes which bound distant China to the Europe. Nonetheless, the history of these peoples is hard to make out, either broadly or in detail. The best starting-point is geography. Its northern wall is provided by the Siberian forest mass, and the southern by deserts and great mountain ranges. Its remoteness from the ocean produced an arid climate, and grassy steppe for the most part. The people of Central Asian steppe seem distinctive at the moment they enter history; specialists in the difficult art of living on the move, following pasture with their flocks and herds, and especially adept at using the composite bow from horseback. They could carry out elaborate weaving, carving and decoration, but of course, did not build, for they lived in their tents. At the extreme end of this unbroken range of open grasslands, which reach all the way to Europe, lies the high plateau of Mongolia, original homeland of both Turks and later the Mongols. Unlike the sudden eruption of the Mongols in the 13th-century, the westward migration of many different Turkic groups was a gradual and largely uncharted process. The life of a nomad leaves few physical traces, and it's only when they acquired power in some region that they can be glimpsed in the historical record. In the 6th-century, some Turks were as far west as Eastern Europe, where they were called Avars (580-804), and long troubled the Byzantine Empire; they probably introduced the stirrup to Europe, and with it a revolution in cavalry warfare. The Turkic Bulgars split from the Avars sometime after 600, and subsequently merged with settled Slavic tribes, forming the ancestors of modern Bulgarians. Other Turkic clans - the Khazars (650-969) and Pechenegs (860–1091) - settled in what is now the Ukraine and southern Russia, where they played important parts in the history of the Near East and Russia. Turkic clans probably fought as mercenaries for both the Muslims and Tang Chinese at the Battle of Talas (751). By the 10th-century, the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) had ceased to exist in a political sense, fractured into numerous regional Muslim powers. The most important were: the Fatimid Dynasty (909-1171) controlling Egypt, Palestine, and southern Syria; the Hamdanid Dynasty of Anatolia and northern Syria; the Buyid Dynasty (934–1062) of western Persia and Iraq; and finally the Samanid Dynasty (819–999) of eastern Persia. Listing these four powers far from exhausts the complexity of the unsettled Islamic world. Turkish slave-soldiers or Mamelukes had long served in the Caliph’s armies; now in the 10th-century they were playing an increasingly important role in the frontier defences of the Abbasid successor states. But in the recurrent pattern of barbarians on the periphery of civilization, they have their own ideas. One such group were the Ghaznavids (977-1186), a dynasty which briefly built a huge empire centred on the city of Ghazni, that stretched into India. But they were in their turn pushed aside another Turkic group, the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuks migrated in the late 10th century to the northern borders of the Islamic world, and gradually succumbed to its powerful religious influence, abandoning their own shamanism for Islam. The obvious stepping stone towards greater power was the wealth and power of the Ghaznavids. The first great Seljuk leader Tughril Beg (d. 1063) and his brother Chaghri sacked Ghazni in 1137, while the Ghaznavids were campaigning in India. The Ghaznavid ruler Mas'ud (d. 1040) hurried home to confront this threat, but was decisively defeated at the Battle of Dandanaqan (May 1040), and forced to abandon most of his western territories to the Seljuqs. Tughril Beg now looked west for even greater prizes. After the collapse of the Samanid Dynasty in 999, Persia had descended into a state of anarchy, with many petty princes waging war against on another; most were of the Shi'a branch of Islam, and the authority of the Sunni Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad was no more than nominal. Slowly and methodically, Tughril Beg fought his way westwards through Persia, and then turned on the Buyids. By 1055, he was in a position to enter Baghdad itself. He did so without violence, being welcomed by Abbasid Caliph Al-Qa'im (1031-75) as the restorers of Muslim unity. Now that there was a strong Sunni empire to rival Shi'a Fatimid Egypt, he also gave them an ambitious task; to bring Egypt back into the orthodox fold. Thus ultimately proved beyond the powers of Tughril Beg, and his still somewhat unruly Turkic tribesmen. But for the next two generations the Seljuks retained control in Baghdad, as the centre of an empire restored to extensive boundaries. In many ways, the Seljuks played an outstanding historic role. Not only did they crystallize a new Islamic world which this time included Turkish peoples, and begin the settlement of Turks in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), but they provoked the Crusades. Warfare between the Fatimids and Seljuqs naturally occurred in the border regions of Syria and Palestine, causing great disruption for the local Christians and for Western pilgrims; the Fatimids lost Jerusalem itself in 1073, and then recaptured it in 1098. While the Seljuk Sultans pursued peaceful relations for the most part with the Byzantine Empire, they were unable to restrain the less disciplined Turkic tribes from raiding Byzantine Anatolia for easy plunder. This finally provoked a response from Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes (d. 1071). The two armies met at the Battle of Manzikert (1071), a resounding victory for the Seljuks and a turning point in the story of Byzantium. By 1080, most of Anatolia was in Seljuk hands. Then in 1092, the Seljuk Empire fell into chaos after the assassination of the third Sultan, Malikshāh I (1072-92), as rival successors and regional governors carved up the territory, and waged war against each other. To Byzantine Emperor Alexios I (d. 1118), this seemed the perfect opportunity to regain lost imperial territory, but lacking the troops to go on the offensive, he wrote a fateful letter to the Pope seeking Western help. The help he sought was simply some mercenary forces; what he got was the First Crusaders.Category:Historical Periods